The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

The Fourth Amendment was originally conceived to prevent the state from engaging in gross and indiscriminate invasions of people’s homes and privacy. The insatiable drive to “find the drugs,” however, has given rise to a range of judicial rulings and legislative inventions that have eroded that right. Federal courts have consistently expanded the powers of the police to randomly stop people, search their possessions, spy on their homes, tap their phones, go through their garbage, and investigate their personal finances.

The fact that most of these home invasions produce only small amounts of drugs, and in many cases none, seems of small concern to a judiciary obsessed with expanding police power. This is the ideological victory of the drug warriors, who have succeeded in their effort to portray drug dealers as the root of all evil. No penalty is too harsh and no method too extreme if it means getting another dealer off the streets.

The drug warriors always justify their expanding power with tales of the lives lost to drugs, but prohibition actually undermines health outcomes for drug users. Since drugs are illegal, there can be no regulation of their purity or potency. Dangerous additives and unpredictable dosages lead to overdoses, infections, abscesses, and poisonings.

As a result, there have been an increasing number of experiments with alternatives to conventional strategies of punishment and incarceration. Some have involved reducing the penalties through changes in laws and enforcement practices. Others have embraced alternative sentencing regimes that attempt to divert people into various treatment approaches. Unfortunately, what most of these approaches share is a reliance on police as gatekeepers. Drug courts, diversion programs, and various forms of decriminalization all place police in a central role that usually involves deciding who gets jail and who gets treatment, while maintaining a fundamentally punitive and moralizing approach to drugs.

There is also a net-widening effect: drug courts meld together punitive and therapeutic approaches in very counterproductive ways that extend rather than reduce the role of the criminal justice system in the lives of drug users, creating what sociologist Rebecca Tiger calls an “outpatient incarceration” effect.

The treatment programs themselves are also problematic. Some are little more than court-mandated twelve-step programs, suffused with an ethos of moral reform and punishment in which people are berated, harassed, and threatened for violating any of a host of minor rules.53 Often this is driven by a mindset that people will only get off drugs if they “hit bottom,” are confronted with their failures, and then experience a moral reawakening. Medically driven strategies with track records of success are derided as enabling addiction. The research, however, shows that coerced treatment, humiliation, and belittlement are incredibly counterproductive in ending addiction.

Even when these courts do offer useful services, access to them is driven by engagement with police: to access court-ordered services one first has to be arrested.

Finally, these courts only serve people with “drug problems,” which means they exclude the large number of people arrested on drug charges who are not themselves drug users. They go straight to prison—one reason why drug courts have had little impact on overall imprisonment rates.

Decriminalization programs that leave open the role of police in making discretionary decisions or that otherwise tie people up with the criminal justice system still create a heavy burden on individuals and communities, primarily of color.

The use of police to wage a war on drugs has been a total nightmare. Not only have they failed to reduce drug use and the harm it produces, they have actually worsened those harms and destroyed the lives of millions of Americans through pointless criminalization. Ultimately, we must create robust public health programs and economic development strategies to reduce demand and help people manage their drug problems in ways that reduce harm—while keeping in mind that most drug users are not addicts.

Harm-reduction, public-health, and legalization strategies, combined with robust economic development of poor communities could dramatically reduce the negative impact of drugs on society without relying on police, courts, and prisons.

legalization opens the door to the possibility of reasserting informal social controls on problem behavior.61 By bringing drug use out of the shadows, families, friends, and others will be in a stronger position to set limits on the behavior of users. Social norms are always more powerful and effective than formal, punitive ones.

There is no way to reduce the widespread use of drugs without dealing with profound economic inequality and a growing sense of hopelessness.

The dynamic between street gangs and the police looks a lot like a war between competing gangs, with each side using constantly increasing terror to try to show who is toughest.

While Los Angeles and Chicago remain outliers in the intensity and extent of gang activity, other cities are gaining ground, giving rise to a wide variety of police-centered suppression strategies at the local, state, and national level. Hundreds of cities and many states now have dedicated gang units that concentrate on intelligence gathering and intensive enforcement.

Gang units tend to take on two main functions: intelligence gathering and street suppression. A few units maintain a largely intelligence-gathering function, channeling information about gang activity to enforcement units in patrol, narcotics, and other divisions. Most, however, are directly involved in suppression. Tactics include both long- and short-term investigations and random patrols. They harass gang members constantly on the street and in their homes and target them for frequent arrest.

There are a lot of misunderstandings about the nature of gangs, which have come to play a role in the way that police handle them. Strategies that seek to “eradicate” gangs often fail to consider exactly who the targets for such action are, or the effect on those targeted and on the community.

A lot of property and violent crime are committed by young people, and much of it happens in poor communities, especially black and Latino ones; wealthier kids are generally less likely to get caught and more likely to be dealt with informally or leniently if apprehended.7 The police tend to see most youth criminality in gang neighborhoods as gang-related.

Even in the most gang-intensive communities, only 10 to 15 percent of young people are in gangs; research consistently shows that most involvement is short-lived, lasting on average only a year. While some become intensively involved and identified with their gangs, many more have a looser connection and drift in and out depending on life circumstances. Rarely does leaving result in serious consequences. A new child or job are generally sufficient explanation for not being on the streets any longer.

There is also evidence that intensive gang enforcement breeds gang cohesion. The constant threat of police harassment becomes a central shared experience of gang life and contributes to a sense of “us against the world,” in an ironic converse of the police mentality. Gangs often thrive on a sense of adventure; boasting and fraught encounters with the police become central aspects of gang identity.

People can be penalized for associating with family members and lifelong friends—sometimes without realizing it. People who have long since left gang life but remain in a database may find themselves or those they associate with criminalized for walking down the street together. Ana Muñiz argues that one of the primary functions of these injunctions is maintaining racial boundaries by tightly constraining the behaviors and movements of black and brown youth.

New York City’s expanded emphasis on gang suppression is being driven by the legal and political pushback against “stop-and-frisk” policing. She says that when police lost the ability to engage young people of color through street stops, they developed new but similarly invasive gang policing techniques under a new name. In both cases, black and brown youth are singled out for police harassment without adequate legal justification because they represent a “dangerous class” of major concern to police.

Life skills and socialization classes do nothing to create real opportunities for people, instead reinforcing an ethos of “personal responsibility” that often ends up blaming the victims for their unemployment and educational failure in communities that are poor, underserviced, segregated, and dangerous.

Redirecting resources from policing, courts, and jails to community centers and youth jobs is crucial to the real reforms needed to reduce juvenile violence. We are spending billions of dollars annually to try to police and incarcerate our way out of our youth violence problems while simultaneously reducing resources to improve the lives of children and families.

First, we must have a real conversation about the entrenched, racialized poverty concentrated in highly segregated neighborhoods, which are the main source of violent crime. It is true that crime has declined overall without major reductions in poverty or segregation, but the crime that remains is concentrated in these areas. Unlike aggressive policing and mass incarceration, doing something about racialized poverty and exclusion would have general benefits for society in terms of reducing poverty, inequality, and racial injustice.

In many cases, the programs that do get funding tend to deal with those young people with the fewest needs. But most programs avoid those who need help the most; those that do serve them tend to have the best results, but only when they involve a sustained, comprehensive approach that deals with both their problems and those of their families.26 Such “wraparound” services have to be at the center of any youth-violence reduction program.

The primary face of local government in poor communities is the police officer, engaged primarily in punitive enforcement actions. Why not build community power and put non-punitive government resources to work instead? Michael Fortner argues that African Americans played an important role in ushering in the era of mass incarceration and overpolicing by demanding that local government do something about crime and disorder.27 What this analysis misses is that many of these same leaders also asked for community centers, youth programs, improved schools, and jobs, but these requests were ignored in favor of more police, enhanced prosecutions, and longer prison sentences. It’s time to revisit this equation.

So much of the youth gang and violence problem stems, as David Kennedy’s research points out, from a sense of insecurity.30 When young people are constantly at risk of victimization, they turn to gangs and weapons to provide some semblance of protection. Communities need help in exercising informal controls to try and break this dynamic.

Youth workers, coaches, and school counselors can all play a role in mentoring and monitoring young people. In too many cases, however, we are replacing them with more police. When communities demand more police, those resources have to come from somewhere else, and too often they come from schools and community services. This all squares nicely with austerity politics, where social programs are slashed to make way for tax cuts for the rich and enhanced formal social control mechanisms.

Minneapolis has a “Blueprint for Action to Prevent Youth Violence,” a multi-agency effort involving government, nonprofits, and community members.33 Unlike gang-suppression efforts, it’s housed in the health department rather than the police department. The blueprint brings people together to discuss existing problems and programs and tries to coordinate their efforts and prioritize funding for new services and initiatives. It’s a flexible real-time process that responds to conditions as they change. The two main drawbacks are a lack of resources and a lack of buy-in from the police department. This creates a dynamic where young people who are involved in programs and positive activities are still being harassed and arrested by the police.

Until the late nineteenth century, the US had no formal immigration restrictions. The border was essentially open, with only customs controls directed at shipping.

Throughout this period, groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Party organized around ideas of racial purity, cultural superiority, and religious prejudice to demand an end to open immigration. This was finally achieved in 1924 with the passage of the National Origins Act, which established nationality-based immigration quotas for the first time. To enforce these quotas, Congress created the US Border Patrol.

US border enforcement has been primarily about the production of whiteness and economic inequality. The border has never been truly closed to poor immigrants. They have been allowed in, with tight regulation, or officially denied entry but in practice allowed to enter in large numbers, with few legal protections from employer exploitation and abuse. Each of these systems places immigrants in a degraded economic position where their rights to organize are denied and they are forced to work in substandard conditions for low wages.

In 1992 there were just over four thousand Border Patrol agents; following the attacks of September 11, 2001, that number increased to ten thousand; today it stands at more than twenty thousand, making it larger than the ATF, FBI, and DEA combined.

In fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent more than $18 billion on immigration enforcement—more than all other federal law-enforcement spending combined.

Martha Menchaca’s Recovering History, Constructing Race describes how racial hierarchies were first established in the border region by the Spanish elite and later by American settlers looking to justify their expropriation of Native and Mexican lands.8 Even some longstanding Mexican Americans have attempted to achieve whiteness by encouraging the exclusion of new immigrants who undermine their attempts to equate themselves with Americanness—though, by embracing a racialized system of exclusion, they reinforce a racial caste system that in turn defines and treats them as less than full citizens.

As a result, the policy shifted from what was euphemistically called “catch and release” to one of “capture and hold.” For decades, most migrants caught crossing the border were asked to waive their right to a hearing to challenge their deportation and then quickly returned to Mexico, spending as little time in custody as possible, which was generally advantageous for both the migrant and the US government. Now, an ever-growing number of migrants are being prosecuted.

The US government has spent $7 billion on this approach, with much of the money going to private, for-profit prisons. Despite the prosecution and incarceration of three-quarters of a million people at the border, they found no deterrent effect on migrants, who are driven by profound and desperate poverty and the desire to unify families.

Even though apprehensions along the border have been declining for decades, nearly 40 percent of all federal prosecutions are now related to immigration.

In addition, ICE subcontracting opportunities have encouraged a boom in jail and prison construction across the Southwest. Both local jurisdictions and these corporations have a financial stake in maintaining high rates of detention, further perverting the politics of immigration.

In addition, the US has issued about a million detainer orders, requesting local and state police to hold someone suspected of being in the country illegally. These detainers ask local police and sheriffs to be the front line of immigration enforcement.

287(g) is part of a process of enhancing police power by blurring the lines between civil and criminal enforcement. Normally police are required to ensure people’s constitutional rights when they suspect them of a criminal violation. Since most immigration violations are technically civil, the same protections do not apply.

The US employs a “supply-side” strategy of denying people access to drugs through interdiction and criminalization. Interdiction involves using the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, US military, and ICE to interrupt the flow of drugs into the country. It has failed. A recent report showed that 80 percent of the people arrested on drug charges by the Border Patrol were US citizens.

The Border Patrol has never had any effective accountability mechanism. While it is technically subject to internal investigations and congressional oversight, prosecutions and disciplining of officers are rare.

Low-level misuse of funds and corruption remain a problem. Since 2003, the DHS has been increasingly pulling local police into the job of border enforcement. While 287(g) asks for police cooperation in identifying criminal aliens, Operation Stonegarden directly subsidized local police to undertake a variety of border enforcement activities, including money for overtime pay and special equipment for drug raids, pursuing suspected illegal migrants, and patrolling the border.

If we want to raise the standard of living of agricultural workers, we have to allow them to organize, pay them higher wages, and enforce necessary health and safety standards. If US citizens could make higher wages doing this work, more of them might choose to do it. As it stands now, employers prefer to hire undocumented migrants precisely because they know that organized resistance is much less likely among this population.

Instead, employers regularly rely on racial minorities who are authorized to work, consciously taking advantage of the racial antipathies that they themselves have worked hard to create in order to keep workers divided and playing one group against another. It is very hard for unions with predominantly white memberships to tell black workers, whom they’ve historically excluded, not to cross a picket line. Increasingly the AFL-CIO has come to realize that the only hope for improving the lives of working people is to foster broad solidarity rather than antagonism.

Heavy-handed immigration policing will not build a workers’ movement; it will shatter it.

The last twenty years have taught us that these global economic arrangements do not include national allegiance on the part of corporations or sharing wealth within national economies. The wealth of the United States has increased dramatically in the last two decades, but all of that growth has gone exclusively to the richest 10 percent. The rest of us have seen wages and government services decrease. Our standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of unregulated neoliberal capitalism, which has allowed corporations and the rich to avoid paying taxes or decent wages.

Borders are inherently unjust and as Reece Jones points out in his book Violent Borders, they reproduce inequality, which is backed up by the violence of state actors and the indignity and danger of being forced to cross borders illegally.